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On Friday, July 25 the ZSR Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery department headed to Asheville for the annual NC Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery Conference. Tara and I shared the ZSR van with our ILL colleagues, Anna Milholland at Salem College and Angie Hobbs from the WFU Professional Center Library. Our half of the Conference was held at Western Carolina’s facility at Biltmore Park. The other half of the Conference was being held simultaneously at UNC-Wilmington.

Here’s Tara’s report on the morning session:
The morning session was about Best Practices in ILL. Our session was led by James Harper and JoAnn Marvel from Western Carolina. Also presenting was Brooke Andrade, from the National Humanities Center conferencing in from UNC Wilmington, NC. The session was about pros/cons in Interlibrary Loans/Document Delivery Services. We were given a lot of helpful knowledge as they discussed the ALA Interlibrary Loan Code, and the responsibilities of the Borrowing & Lending libraries. Also discussed were the dos and don’ts of how to package Library materials.

Here’s my report of the rest of the day:
After exploring Biltmore Park restaurants and shops during the lunch break we headed back to the Conference. The afternoon session options were based on the ILL system that we use in our library. Anna and Angie attended the OCLC WorldShare session with Tony Melvin of OCLC and Tara and I attended the ILLiad session with Genie Powell, Chief Customer Officer from Atlas Systems, Inc.

Some of the ILLiad updates that may be helpful here at ZSR are custom “flags” and auto mode for Odyssey Helper. I’m familiar with the flags because they’re used in Ares to mark requests that need a particular action. When a request needs attention it will appear in its own flag queue as well as its original queue until you remove the flag. This way you can take care of the action needed without changing the status of the request.

Our current workflow involves having to open a stand-alone version of Odyssey Helper to upload the article scans we’ve made and deliver them to our patrons and borrowing libraries. With the next upgrade of ILLiad, Odyssey Helper will be incorporated into the ILLiad interface and will automatically send documents that are in the proper status. We’re hoping this works as well as it sounds as the stand-alone version requires patience.

The committee for this Conference was headed up by James Harper who did a great job of coordinating all the technology involved in trying to make the Conference geographically accessible to all interested North Carolina libraries. He was one of the presenters in the morning, he coordinated the audio and video from Asheville to Wilmington, the audio and video from Wilmington to Asheville, the guest speakers who were virtually joining us from Ohio and Virginia, and managed to throw in some humor along the way. James’ day reminded me of a plate spinning act on the Ed Sullivan Show.

The Conference was a good opportunity to catch up with friends and share/vent with ILL colleagues. On the way home we encountered this new NC resident on the freeway

and Tara artfully avoided the chicken cage that had apparently fallen off a truck and was in the middle of our lane on I-40.